News

The European Southern Observatory has signed a phase A study contract with the MOSAIC consortium. The multi-object spectrograph will be the workhorse instrument for the E-ELT, being the biggest telescope in the world with its 39m diameter primary mirror. MOSAIC will be the world-leading MOS ...

Scientists have reproduced the conditions inside the magma chamber of a supervolcano to understand what it takes to trigger its explosion. These rare events represent the biggest natural catastrophes on Earth except for the impact of giant meteorites. Using synchrotron X-rays, the scientists ...

The natural increase in solar luminosity—a very slow process unrelated to current climate warming—will cause the Earth's temperatures to rise over the next few hundred million years. This will result in the complete evaporation of the oceans. Devised by a team from the Laboratoire de ...

An international team including CNRS, Météo-France, CEA, UVSQ and INERIS1 has carried out and analyzed2 an ensemble of climate projections for the whole of Europe at an unprecedented resolution of 12 km, by downscaling the global simulations performed for the 5th IPCC report. These simulations ...

It is difficult to forecast heavy precipitation events accurately and reliably. The quality of these forecasts is affected by two processes whose relative importance has now been quantified by a team at the Laboratoire d'Aérologie (CNRS / Université Toulouse III–Paul Sabatier). The ...

During the past decades the findings of scientific ocean drilling expeditions have fundamentally changed the way we look at our blue planet. Today we have a much better grasp of how processes like earthquakes and tsunamis develop; ocean drilling made it possible to prove the theory of plate ...

Could the future of the ocean depend on its smallest organisms? An experiment conducted as part of the European project EPOCA, coordinated by Jean-Pierre Gattuso of the Laboratoire d'Océanographie de Villefranche (CNRS/UPMC), has shown that pico- and nanoplankton benefit from increases in ...

The beginning of the last glacial period was characterized in the Northern hemisphere by significant accumulation of snow at high latitudes and the formation of a huge polar ice sheet. For climatologists this was paradoxical, since snowfall is always associated with high humidity and ...

In 2009 and 2010, the underwater neutrino telescope ANTARES detected an unusual phenomenon: the bioluminescence of deep-sea organisms suddenly increased, revealing an unexpected connection between biological activity—bioluminescence—and the motion of water masses in the deep ocean. ...